Blogging may be light for the next few days (snort). While I dislike, for the most part, posts that start off with a bunch of self-flagellation about not blogging recently, I'm going to do it just this once. I have a good reason for my non-blogging; right now I'm in Greenville, North Carolina, where I'm pretty sure we have decided on a house to rent. Come late next month, I'll be joining the faculty at East Carolina University, and I couldn't be more excited.

I have finally usurped the Tom Clancy FAQ to become the #1 hit in a Google search for Clancy. I've waited for this for such a long time. Check it out; this may only last a little while.

Edited: Well, it was good for that minute. Or maybe I never was #1. Maybe it was that stupid Google "Personalized Search (Beta)" deal. Argh.

Not much longer now...

These are some apt quotations I culled from Kitchen Tables and Rented Rooms: The Extracurriculum of Composition by Anne Ruggles Gere. They're just clippings; I don't have any commentary at the moment but to call your attention to the fact that all the blogging and Xanga-ing and LiveJournaling and Facebooking and MySpacing that college-age students do is an important part of the extracurriculum of composition -- but you already knew I'd say that.

In concentrating upon establishing our position within the academy, we have neglected to recount the history of composition in other contexts; we have neglected composition's extracurriculum. (p. 79)

my version of the extracurriculum includes the present as well as the past; it extends beyond the academy to encompass the multiple contexts in which persons seek to improve their own writing; it includes more diversity in gender, race, and class among writers; and it avoids, as much as possible, a reenactment of professionalization in its narrative. (p. 80)

[Gere points to] the need to uncouple composition and schooling, to consider the situatedness of composition practices, to focus on the experiences of writers not always visible to us inside the walls of the academy. (p. 80)

The extracurriculum I examine is constructed by desire, by the aspirations and imaginations of its participants. It posits writing as an action undertaken by motivated individuals who frequently see it as having social and economic consequences, including transformations in personal relationships and farming practices. (p. 80)

Like medical doctors who learn from nutritionists, shamans, and artists without compromising their professional status, we can benefit from examining how the extracurriculum confers authority for representation and how we might extend that authority in our classes. Our students would benefit if we learned to see them as individuals who seek to write, not be written about, who seek to publish, not be published about, who seek to theorize, not be theorized about. (p. 89)

Thought I'd pass on this article by Jodi Dean on academic blogging. She has some interesting stuff to say about argument in general based on her experience blogging:

What do those of us on the critical left do when we are the ones responsible for drawing the lines, setting the limits, that is, when we have to decide on exclusion? How do we bring other values into play, values perhaps associated with transgression, with challenges to normativity, authority, and the hegemonic arrangement of power? Differently put, when one is accustomed to discussion in a critical left, critically informed setting, how does one interact once these assumptions no longer hold, once the discussion is really open, once the audience is really diverse, that is, once it includes those others one finds most other and repellant?

She's referring here to comments left on her blog by neo-nazis.

I found this excerpt interesting too:

The theory blogs—and I am thinking primarily of about thirty or so interconnected blogs—generally combine personal and theoretical explorations, discussions of culture and politics, reflections on academic practices, and anything that strikes the blogger’s fancy. So, while they share a thread of theoretical concerns, they also differ greatly. The authors might be single or groups. They might or might not allow comments. They might post daily or less than once a week. Their tones and personalities differ. Some blogs are playful, filled with rough and tumble banter. Others feel a bit like a seminar or like meeting up in a restaurant or bar after the seminar has ended in order to continue the discussion. Still others have the feel of reflections, notes, and drafts, moments of thought and writing usually more private and isolated now open to those who might want to consider them, who might have a suggestion or two. I think of notebooks left open for other’s marginalia. What is particularly remarkable is the way these differing blogs interact, conversations moving from one site to another or taking place on several sites at once, conversations branching into differing sets of links, never encompassing them all, but rarely limited to one. So, some of the same people appear in various conversations, although not all of the same people will comment at each blog. What the theory blogs suggest, then, is a practice of blogging that is more than journalism, more than diary keeping, and more than remediation. Ours is a practice of critical conversation beyond and through existing institutional frameworks.

While some of this part, especially about the conversations across multiple sites, writing about anything that strikes one's fancy, etc., isn't new and could be said of any kind of blogging, I like her metaphors here: the bar after the seminar, notebooks left open. Readers respond to the article here and here.

On a completely different note: I HATE insomnia. I wish I could like it; I've had it as long as I can remember, even in childhood. Oh, and exercise does not help. Check out the "Exercise" block in my sidebar if you don't believe me.

"I love it when I'm around the country club, and I hear people talking about the debilitating effects of a welfare society," he said later. "At the same time, they leave their kids a lifetime and beyond of food stamps. Instead of having a welfare officer, they have a trust officer. And instead of food stamps, they have stocks and bonds."

--Warren Buffett

Addendum: This is a very informative analysis of philanthropy. It makes me think I should probably be reading Phil more often.

Let's say you reviewed a manuscript for a journal back in 2004. You thought the essay was excellent: research that was very much needed. You gave it a verdict of "accept with revisions" and suggested some areas that needed improvement. You've looked at all the issues of the journal since then (there have been nine), and you don't see the article. You want to cite this essay in your dissertation, but you don't know who wrote it, or if it ever found a home. What do you do? Do you write to the journal and ask for the identity of the author?

• Color me impressed with All Girl Army. Jenny emailed me the announcement that the site is live, so I clicked over there. The contributors to the site are writing letters to themselves in the future, which is a great idea. In fact, I had a high school English teacher who assigned a letter to ourselves ten years in the future. She told us to turn them in in sealed, stamped envelopes with the address that would be most likely to serve as a permanent address. She promised to mail them to us. She didn't. You don't know how many times I've wanted to put her name here as a Google bomb. I've even halfway hoped that she had a good reason for not sending the letters, like a fire burned her house to the ground. The only thing I remember writing in the letter was "Re-read The Awakening." So I probably ought to get around to that soon. Anyway, check out All Girl Army.
• I read this article on ethanol with interest, especially this part:
  

  Last year corn production topped 11 billion bushels — second only to 2004's record harvest. But many analysts doubt whether the scientists and farmers can keep up with the ethanol merchants.

  "By the middle of 2007, there will be a food fight between the livestock industry and this biofuels or ethanol industry," Mr. Basse, the economic forecaster, said. "As the corn price reaches up above $3 a bushel, the livestock industry will be forced to raise prices or reduce their herds. At that point the U.S. consumer will start to see rising food prices or food inflation."

  If that occurs, the battleground is likely to shift to some 35 million acres of land set aside under a 1985 program for conservation and to help prevent overproduction. Farmers are paid an annual subsidy averaging $48 an acre not to raise crops on the land. But the profit lure of ethanol could be great enough to push the acreage, much of it considered marginal, back into production.

  Huh. I know there are probably lots of technical and economic reasons this won't work (ethanol can be make more cheaply with sugar than with corn), but what about all that corn used to make the high-fructose corn syrup that's in everything, which may be contributing to the obesity epidemic? How about taking that corn syrup out of the ranch dressing and using that corn for ethanol? This way, maybe the livestock can still eat cheap corn, and the conservation reserve can continue to lay fallow. I wish the article had addressed that argument.

• Check out Bill Benzon's essay about YouTube. Good stuff.
• Songs about sad songs are annoying, and I want to put a stop to them. I mean, there's "So Sick" by LL Cool J feat. Ne-Yo, Elton John's "Sad Songs (Say So Much)," "There'll Be Sad Songs (To Make You Cry)" by Billy Ocean, and "Another Sad Love Song" by Toni Braxton. When will it end?